March 2010

March 30, 2010

I am unabashedly bullish on the impact of social media applied to the enterprise and, more specifically, on e-learning. Social + Learning is a formula that is both powerful and transformative.

In my last post, I put forth the opinion that enterprise 2.0 technologies heretofore are “empty drums.”

What I meant by this is that a successful social community needs three ingredients to be successful: 1) Enabling Technology; 2) Vibrant Community; and 3) Great Content. With no community and no content, you are left with an empty barrel where users don’t contribute because it looks like no one visits and no one visits because it looks like no one contributes.

The key is social media’s power of “amplification.” Amplification is the reason the New York Times gets one billion hits to its content monthly and has become one of the most accessed content sources on the planet. It’s great content, accessed by a vibrant community, facilitated by enabling technology (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

So as you think about the emerging role of social as part of your learning strategy, don’t focus on the enabling technology as much as how you can leverage the two ingredients that you already have. You probably already have a license to use a variety of digital books and other learning assets. If you are a SkillSoft client, this means that you likely have enterprise courseware, simulations, e-books, analyst reports, video programs, job aids, etc. And, you already have a captive base of users consuming this content. You have two of the three ingredients.

Now, when you consider the missing ingredient – the enabling technology, think about which learning provider can provide you not with an ‘empty drum,’ but with a social learning framework that immediately takes advantage of your existing e-learning investments.

This notion of leveraging the amplification benefits of social technology to enable users to create profiles, discover one another, co-create useful content in context, share it easily, rate it, build a reputation, and ultimately tailor the learning repository into a living, dynamic community is the core design principle behind SkillSoft’s social strategy.

We call it inGenius. We’re seeing the excitement for it build within our community, especially since our friends at Bersin & Associates announced that we’ll launch it at its IMPACT 2010 conference.

I invite you to try inGenius to see for yourself how this approach can immediately begin driving social results that are meaningful, safe, and aligned to your learning initiatives.

March 26, 2010

You can’t dispute the numbers. Social media is having a profound impact on the way we communicate and learn. If the Facebook community was a country, it would be the third most populated in the world, behind only China and India. In fact, this month, Facebook surpassed Google for the first time as the most visited site on the web. Twitter emerged from obscurity at the SXSW Interactive Conference in 2007 to become the third most used social media network with 55 million unique monthly visits according to Nielsen.com.

This has opened the floodgates to companies hawking “Enterprise 2.0” versions of social media tools just for organizations. At last count, there were over 400 tools and technologies offering some element of ‘behind the firewall’ social capabilities.

So how does a learning leader make quick sense of this crowded field?

The dirty little secret is that these tools all have one common trait. Some would call it a fatal flaw: they are all simply enabling technologies. I call them ‘empty drums.’ What I mean by this is that a successful social community needs three ingredients to be successful: 1) Enabling Technology; 2) Vibrant Community; and 3) Great Content. With no community and no content, you are left with an empty barrel where users don’t contribute because it looks like no one visits and no one visits because it looks like no one contributes.

Trying to build a culture of successful collaboration through social learning with just one of the three is like trying to sit on a one-legged stool. You will get hurt.

For evidence, take a look at a white paper published by McKinsey last year entitled “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.” It looked at organizations that tried using just enabling technology and the lessons learned included:

“Perhaps because of the novelty of Web 2.0 initiatives, they’re often considered separate from mainstream work…Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.” (McKinsey, March 2009)

In other words, after the fanfare of the initial rollout, these sites quickly lost momentum. They did not build or stimulate sustainable collaboration. They did not transform e-learning.

So, what has the potential to fill Enterprise 2.0’s empty drum? I’ll talk about that in my next blog post (hint: social+learning). Until then, I’d love to hear from you about what a learning leader should do differently. Let’s discuss in the comments.

March 22, 2010

With the recent
announcement that Training magazine will cease
publication after the March/April issue, I was reminded of a meeting I had about
six years ago with its publisher (this was before Training was acquired by Nielsen).The topic of the meeting was advertising, but we quickly got
into a discussion of the publication’s name.The publisher felt that Training
was a great name, and expressed annoyance with the more recent fascination with
the word “learning.”“You don’t learn people, you train
them,” he said in exasperation.He
went on to say that their audience research showed conclusively that chief
learning officers were scarcer than hen’s teeth.“The title doesn’t exist,” he fumed.

As a marketer, I could sympathize with his frustration.Sometimes a perfectly good product or
publication name suddenly can seem dated or even take on a negative cast. That seems to be what has happened with
the word “training.”The word has, for many people, become
associated with a limited set of educational initiatives.It connotes one-way communication, and
we tend to associate it with compliance
or teaching a relatively simple process. It’s not to say that training is bad; it’s just that we now
see it as a small part of what learning has to offer, not the totality.

The growth in the learning field in recent years has been around
providing an ecosystem of learning resources that support today’s complex
organizational requirements, in the flow of work and at the point of need. It’s
likely to include e-learning, online learning courseware,
digital books, virtual
mentors or any other of a number of informal resources.It may be compelled by management
or it may be a completely learner-driven experience.In some cases the “trainers” are the learners themselves,
especially with the emergence of social learning
platforms such as inGenius.Obviously it also may include classroom events, but these are an ever
decreasing part of the learning mix. For more background on the topic: you
might consider reading Training and
Development (T&D) Magazine’s in-depth article: “Disappearing
Act: The Vanishing Corporate Classroom”.

Training departments are changing in many ways to reflect
this new reality, and sometimes that involves a name change as well.For some this may precipitate a bit of
an identity crisis, but I would submit that it is better to change the name of
the department than to become irrelevant to the organization’s objectives.Training
magazine was a great publication for many years, and I can’t help but wonder
how much of a role the name played in its demise.

On a scale of 1 to 5, I would rate the conference a
4.3. There was definitely some great content and research shared along
with many interesting hallway conversations with IT leaders from an
amazing array of organizations, both commercial and government.

The BIG BUZZ was “everything 2.0”! Enterprise 2.0
evangelist and principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital
Business, Andrew McAfee, delivered
a killer keynote. There was plenty of weighty discussion in session after
session about the Cloud and the enterprise implications of Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube, Google, Sharepoint, etc. and other collaborative
technologies. Plus there was lots of pom-pom waving by the various
speakers about how important these social learning technologies
are to the world.

But what struck me on the drive out of Baltimore was how
much irony the event offered. Gartner, one of the most prestigious
research firms in the IT space, was talking the talk …. but, were they
helping us walk the walk?

Here’s my list of Top 5 ironies regarding
Gartner’s conference from a social learning perspective:

1) Pre-Conference Hash Tag. There wasn’t
one. Ok, the Twitterati will figure one out, but big missed
opportunity. Think of the excitement Gartner could have stoked by publicizing a
#hashtag in advance and inviting analysts to tweet on some of
the themes before we arrived. (And after we’re gone!) By the
way, there’s great conversation here: #gartnerpcc. (Note:
Gartner claims there was one, but it wasn’t well communicated. They admit
they should have been more active pre-event.)

2) Power Strips. If we know one thing
about World 2.0, it’s that it consumes a heck of a lot of old-fashioned
power. Just look at Google with its largest-on-the-planet data
centers. So, if you are going to encourage an army of 800 to tweet
at the conference, don’t stick them in large ballrooms with absolutely no power
strips. Kudos to Tim
O’Reilly, who always has gaggles of heavy
duty power strips in the meeting rooms at his conferences. There
is nothing worse than an interesting speaker, many tweetable
moments, and a battery with 8% power remaining.

3) Attendee List. Seriously, Gartner, you can
do better than a 10-page handout consisting simply of the names
and company of attendees with no other contact info. If we are living
in a social world and hanging out at a serious social conference, why are
all attendees not invited to participate in a private social network tailored
for conferences? Something like IntroNetworks where attendees could
opt-in, upload a picture, discuss their interests plus locate and
connect. Or, you could have one of the several “Community 2.0″ sponsors host an instance for the participants to
leverage during the conference.

4) Question and Answers. This was a
real throw-back. At the end of sessions, staff holding large white placards
with a giant question mark on them walked slowly around the room
encouraging participants to donate a question on a piece of
paper. Excuse me, but the average number of web devices carried per
person at this conference was about 3.6. Everyone had the means to submit
questions digitally. Socially. So why did we have to make those nice
ladies waltz through the crowd?

5) Interactivity. This is a corollary to
#4. Presenters waxed on about how cool this new media is. Why not
show it? It would have been simple to have a second projection system
displaying the live tweet stream during the main ballroom presentations.
Let’s assume there is some wisdom
in the crowds …. and leverage it.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the event. If any of my
Gartner friends are reading this, please consider this as
positive, constructive feedback. I truly believe the event
would have been greatly enriched as a learning opportunity by embracing
the power of the social phenomenon we spent three days analyzing and
discussing, hopefully for next year (i.e. @Summit 2.0).

Did you attend the Summit? What did you think of the conference? Let me know in the comments!

March 15, 2010

Annually, the Books24x7 Product Marketing Team tracks the top searches and the most popular on-demand training titles on Books24x7. The following list is a brief recap of the top titles and top searches across all digital books collections during the calendar year 2009.

Top Books24x7 Titles

Although the number one title across all collections remained unchanged from 2008 through 2009 (175 Ways to Get More Done in Less Time! by David Cottrell and Mark Layton) there was a lot of movement within the top ten titles overall. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) Fourth Edition went from new release status to the number two spot for the year. The Third Edition of the PMBOK® Guide, which was number three in 2008, still hung on to a number eight finish overall. The 2008 second place title, Better Vocabulary in 30 Minutes a Day by Edith Schwager, dropped one position to number three.

The Power of Charm: How to Win Anyone Over in Any Situation by Brian Tracy and Ron Arden

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People: How to Avoid Common Errors in English by Ann Batko and Edward Rosenheim

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 For Dummies by Vanessa L. Williams

Taking a look at the top 50 titles across all collections, 31 titles were IT-related (reflecting the sheer volume of subscribers to the ITPro collections), 13 titles were related to business or IT certification training, 5 titles were related to project management skills and 13 titles were self-help or related to management and leadership skills training related. This mix highlights the variety of collections and titles offered by Books24x7 and the large number of subscribers across a wide range of disciplines and job titles.

Top Books24x7 Searches

Interestingly, “Java” continued as the top search term in 2009 and “Sharepoint”, the number two search term in 2008, dropped down to fifth place in 2009. “Excel” and “ITIL” held the number two and three spots, and “project management” jumped all the way up to the number four position overall in 2009.

Although IT terms still represented a significant portion of the top search terms for all of the past year (44 of the top 50), several business-related terms moved way up. After “project management”, the next most popular business search term was “leadership”, moving into the number 9 position. The other popular business search terms were “PMBOK”, “six sigma”, “management” and “communication”.

March 11, 2010

Do you know what your audience’s e-learning priorities are for the year ahead?

Every year as SkillSoft looks back at the most popular corporate courseware across our many customers, I always find it fun to pick out the trends for the year ahead. 2009’s top 100 business skills courses included stand-by topics like Communication and Professional Development, but also showed strong use in the areas of Leadership and Management.

It is encouraging to me in these times to see companies and employees working on improving skills in these key areas. In terms of Professional Development, we can all benefit from brushing up our skills from time to time; especially when the going is rough. In today’s fast-paced competitive world, strong leaders with solid skills are a must for any company to survive and thrive.

As learning professionals, we have an ideal opportunity to make our employees – and our companies – stronger by providing the right mix of e-learning resources to target these and other training needs within the organization. Broad-based access to e-learning courseware for communication, professional development, office skills, and more can help every employee to achieve their personal best while targeted leadership skills training let you provide your current leaders and high-potential future leaders with tools to improve their talent.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget about yourself. What do you want to learn today? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section!

March 08, 2010

There's an old adage that
goes like this: you take the job for the money, stay for the people, and leave
because of your boss. If we believe this is true, then it becomes
more about the quality of relationship, environment, and fulfilling
expectations (the job actually reflects the brochure), than managing precisely
what people do, how they do it, etc.

So why is it that organizations have such highly refined analytics about
when and how to interact with customers and prospects to maintain
the highest revenue uplift and retention rate? Companies
invest enormous sums to understand exactly when to place a deft customer
service phone call, or extend a sweetened interest rate, or include that 'bonus
VIP' service - all to raise customer retention and revenue. We employ
neuroscience and psycho-graphic profiling to understand motivating factors in
buying behaviors (did you know grocery
stores use slow ambient music to seduce you into staying longer and buying
more?) - and yet, many companies still operate in a command-and-control fashion
with their people, treating them more as instruments.

In Closing the Engagement Gap,
by Julie Gebauer and Don Lowman, they argue that one of the keys (there are
five) to heightened engagement is to offer continuous learning and intellectual
development opportunities. In one example, at EMC's R&D facility in
China, the general manager understood that professional growth and camaraderie
were big motivating factors and created both formal and informal learning,
networking, and socializing activities. Consider the inverse effect -
years ago EMC opened a technical facility in India and immediately
offshored/insourced the more rudimentary and mundane tasks that the U.S.
engineers didn't want. You can guess the Indian engineers were
frustrated, annoyed, and characteristically weren't so inclined to give any
discretionary effort to their work.

And there's the key - since everyone can exercise a discretionary choice
whether to be engaged or not, what are the factors that determine
employee engagement? According to Lowman and Gebauer's Global
Workforce Study, these are the top five:

Senior
management's sincere interest in employee well-being

Opportunity
an employee has to improve skills and capabilities

Organization's
reputation for social responsibility

Opportunity
an employee has to provide input into decision-making in his department

Organization's
ability to quickly resolve customer concerns

Right
there at the top - #1 and #2: strength of relationship with your boss, and
opportunity for intellectual and professional growth is what drives engagement,
innovation and yes, shareholder value. And even if you’re not so hip on
driving shareholder wealth, it sure makes a fun and interesting place to work.

For
more expert opinion on this topic, I invite you to view our QuickTalks leadership skills training video on aligning
top performers by Curt Coffman. In his view, engagement of
employees starts with changing the mindset to embrace top performers in a way
which conveys that the company needs them more than they need the company.

Have
you started to think this way? If, so how has it helped? If not,
why? I’d like to talk about it further in the comments.